Redneck Nation (8 page)

Who has time to worry about shadowy forces of the Illuminati or the Tri-Lateral Commission? My earthbound neighbors are more
than capable of putting my liberty in jeopardy during the biannual election process. It’s not what the Council on Foreign
Relations is doing in private that’s the problem; it’s what the Democratic National Committee is doing in public.

So, unlike many of my fellow Southerners, I’m grateful for the fluoride in my drinking water, not fearful of it. When contrails
crisscross the afternoon sky, I don’t bother to wrap my head in aluminum foil. And if I ever run into Elvis working at the
Burger King at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, I’ll ask him what Jimmy Hoffa’s up to these days.

There is one area of American life, however, that is so irrational, so counterintuitive, and so openly corrupt that I am sometimes
tempted to suspect the Bildeburgers are involved: public education.

America’s government-run school system represents a screwup of such magnitude I am hard-pressed to believe it is a mere accident.
Nothing gets that bad except on purpose. My theory: Rednecks have taken over the American public school system.

Let’s pause for a quick vocabulary lesson: What is a “public” school? What does that mean? Better yet, let’s turn it around:
Can you name a “private” school? Harvard? Yale? The Newport School for Obnoxious, Rich Children Whose Fathers Own Yachts?
Are these schools “private”?

No, they’re not. They are public schools, if we use the word “public” in its most common meaning: a place that is open to
the general public. And whether they’re
parochial, for-profit, or elitist, all so-called private schools are open to any qualified student who can write a check.

We don’t call restaurants “private” just because they’re for-profit businesses that you have to pay to use. Hotels, bars,
stores, doctors’ offices, bordellos—all of these are private businesses where one must pay for the services therein, but none
of them are considered private. They’re public places. In very important, legal terms, they are “places of public accommodation,”
which means the person who owns them can’t even run them as he chooses.

On the other hand, “public” does not necessarily mean publicly funded. The entire state university system is publicly funded,
but not just any member of the public may attend. To attend a state college or tech school, you must meet rigorous academic
standards—okay, not rigorous, but you do need a high school diploma and, in most cases, an SAT that reaches into the low four
digits.

My point here is that we could easily have a publicly funded but privately run school system for K-12 education, and they
would be “public” schools. Only we wouldn’t call them public because in the twisted parlance of twenty-first century America,
a school isn’t public unless it’s run by the government.

“But, Michael, private schools don’t take all the people who apply. That’s what makes them private.”

Wrong again. I’ve been to many restaurants that could not accommodate me because they were already filled with customers.
Other eateries demanded I wear a shirt and shoes. In my younger, alcohol-tinged days, I was tossed out of an establishment
by customers who did not appreciate my 2:00
A.M
. renditions of Verdi’s “La Donna è Mobile.”

When the typical American says “public,” what he really means is “run by the government.” Like “public” radio (as opposed
to those mean ol’
private
radio stations that we’re not allowed to listen to) and “public” parks (you know, the ones that charge admission but
don’t
have any cool rides?), the issue isn’t who gets to attend but who runs the show. For the sake of time, however, we’ll use
the erroneous term “public schools” as a synonym for “government-run schools.” And it is government control of our public
schools that makes them what they are today: expensive, inefficient, and incompetent.

In a word: Southern.

Conspiracy theorists, try this: Imagine if the Freedom Riders and civil rights activists of the 1960s had discovered a public
school system where 80 percent of the black children never graduated. One where those students who did graduate had SAT and
other standardized test scores in the bottom twentieth percentile of the nation? What would the activists’ response have been
after learning that millions of new dollars were supposedly being poured into those schools, even as the number of students
kept dropping? That the number of nepotism-inspired employees kept rising, while the children themselves continued to fail?
How would those seekers of justice, traveling across the Jim Crow South, have reacted to this outrage?

Unfortunately, the school I’m describing wasn’t on the route of the Freedom March and it wasn’t under the jurisdiction of
Governor George Wallace. No, you can find this school system today in Cleveland. And I don’t mean Cleveland, Mississippi.

In 1998, the very northern Cleveland schools had the worst graduation rate in America for black students. An
underwhelming 29 percent of black freshmen had graduated by the end of their senior year, according to the Manhattan Institute.
Do you detect racial bias? Don’t worry—the graduation rate for students of all races was a mere 28 percent. So when it comes
to black kids, Cleveland is actually overachieving!

Where is the second worst major school system in America? Milwaukee, which you will note is also slightly north of the Mason-Dixon
line. Cleveland and Milwaukee, two very northern cities in fairly liberal states, and they, along with Philadelphia and Washington,
D.C., have some of the worst-performing schools in America.

Not that Georgia and Alabama are reaching new heights of academic excellence, but remember: They’re in the South. Their schools
are supposed to suck. As a victim of a hideous southern public school system, I fled North… only to find that the rest of
America was also worshipping at the great altar of illiteracy.

When I first began working on this book and noticing these bright lines of demarcation between the cultures of North and South,
education leaped out at me as the most obvious. Down South, the North has long been synonymous with the word “smart,” though
it was frequently followed by the word “ass.”

Northern attitudes about college are so different from ours. We hear, for example, that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Brown
are popular and well-regarded institutions of higher learning, despite having never appeared in a BCS bowl game. It’s a difficult
concept for Southerners to fathom.

Most southern states don’t have a single top-tier college within their borders. In fact, the southern “Ivy League”
consists of Duke, Vanderbilt, and, if you grade on a curve, Georgia Tech. However, we do lead the nation in educational institutions
dedicated to over-the-road trucking.

So it’s no surprise that our public schools are lousy. All the rest of our schools are, too. But what’s going on up North?
I thought you guys were the smart ones.

If your doctor had a failure rate of 71 percent, he would be desmocked. If a restaurant successfully delivered only a quarter
of the meals ordered, it would be abandoned. If a police force successfully closed 29 percent of its major crime cases, it
would be the Washington, D.C., Metro police department.

But every single day, moms and dads in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philly are required
by the government
to send unsuspecting children to institutions where we know, we absolutely know, that a solid majority of them will fail.
To paraphrase a question I’ve heard most of my life: Hey, Yankee! If you’re so smart, how come your schools suck?

What’s more confusing is that you Northerners don’t seem to care that your public schools are as bad as ours. If you aren’t
worried about the kids, don’t you at least resent the waste of tax dollars? What happened to northern efficiency? Forget about
the poorly educated, overly self-esteemed children (you might as well; the school system sure has); doesn’t it bother you
that the public schools are such a lousy
business
proposition?

In Newark, New Jersey, the average public school education costs the taxpayers around $14,000 per child. Yet Newark is near
the bottom in student achievement. They’re paying for filet mignon and getting last Friday’s meat loaf—and nobody’s complaining?

The one thing I thought I knew about Northerners is that they won’t put up with lousy service. Except for the weather, Yankees
don’t put up with things that suck. And I know this for a fact, because I used to wait tables for a living. Ask any waiter,
and they’ll tell you that Yankees are the last people to say thank you and the first people to send everything back. They’re
the first to ask for the manager, the first to complain to the other tables around them, and, to their credit, much more likely
to leave a decent tip if they get good service. But putting up with bad service is not the northern Way.

I’ve sat in a restaurant in New York and watched a customer take out a meat thermometer to check her dinner. I’ve seen angry
vegans threaten to throw food on the ground in Greenwich Village because it sat on the same platter as a piece of chicken.
I’ve seen customers stand at the table and wave empty glasses at inattentive waiters and, once, two guys from Jersey hit an
assistant manager in the back of the head with a hard roll to get him to turn around. (I found out later that they knew the
guy, but the manager beat the crap out of them, anyway.)

If the cable TV goes out on Sunday afternoon, Yankees don’t show patience and understanding. They get on the phone and start
screaming. “Ice storm, schmice storm! The Jets are playin’ the Giants and I’m missin’ the goddam fourt’ qwatta!” When city
services get screwed up, local pols know northern voters are not easily placated. Chicago politics can hinge entirely on how
quickly an alderman gets a ward heeler his trash pickup.

In short, making a Yankee happy is harder than satisfying an aging harem. And not nearly as much fun. Northerners are living,
breathing quality control experts who,
when it comes to getting what they want, always go down fighting.

But I’m supposed to believe that the same people who speed-dial their lawyer over an underdone steak are cheerfully willing
to accept the highly expensive but wildly unproductive public school system for their own children?

Ah, but that’s the catch, isn’t it? They won’t accept it for their children. Just
yours
.

Northern liberals are tireless defenders of the government-run school system, ardent supporters of higher taxes for public
education, and shameless hypocrites when it comes to educating their own children in private schools. They are absolutely
confident that an open-enrollment, racially mixed, county-run public school is absolutely perfect for absolutely all of America’s
children. And they’ll be glad to drop your kids off on their way to taking Junior to prep school.

Liberals who can’t afford private schools move their families to cultural cul-de-sacs in lily-white suburbs. The children
and grandchildren of white Freedom Riders who fought to integrate southern schools now send their children to private (mostly
white) academies or live in monochromatic, educational enclaves like Rye, New York, and Deer Park, Michigan.

White flight, elitist self-segregation—that’s about as southern as you can get and keep all your teeth. Which explains how
schools in the North can survive while providing crummy service to demanding northern consumers. These Northerners simply
don’t see the public school system as theirs. As long as the one school in their one suburb
works, the school system as a whole simply doesn’t exist to them.

Which is why nobody noticed, for example, when Bill Clinton tapped former South Carolina governor Dick Riley to head the federal
Department of Education. Do you know what South Carolina was ranked in average SAT scores on the day President Clinton made
his pick? Dead last! Bill Clinton literally could not find a politician leading a more poorly educated populace to oversee
our nation’s school system. And nobody so much as cracked a smile.

Imagine if President Clinton had chosen the governor of Iowa to oversee the U.S. Coast Guard, or the senior senator from Utah
to chair the federal Department of Porn. Such a choice would have inspired a loud clearing of throats.

But our public school system is such an overwhelming disaster that choosing the secretary of education from the worst-performing
state doesn’t seem all that different from choosing one from the best. Or my choice, not having a secretary of education at
all.

“But, Michael, we’ve got to have a federal education department; otherwise our public school systems would get even worse!”

Really? How? How could the public school system get any worse?

Seriously, think about it. What could be worse than what we have right now? Thousands of parents send their kids to school
afraid for their physical safety. Hundreds of thousands of students go to schools where we should fear for their intellectual
safety. And millions of taxpayers watch their money disappear each year into the sinkhole
of a $400-billion public school system with no hope of either improvement or accountability.

At least the schools are safe, for the most part. The odds of any particular kid getting shot while at school are relatively
small. Unfortunately, so are the odds of him getting smart. If you want your children bulletproofed, you can buy them a Kevlar
jumpsuit for two grand and save the taxpayers a lot of money.

Not getting our children shot is a good thing. But we’re spending a national average of $7,000 per pupil each year, and there
are those of us who believe this ought to buy something resembling an education. The least we ask is for the public schools
to do no harm. Alas, we are asking too much.

In 1995, America’s fourth graders ranked twelfth in the world in math skills, according to the Third International Mathematics
and Science Study (TIMSS), and third in science. After four additional years of taxpayer-funded education, those same students
ranked eighteenth and nineteenth, respectively. By the time they’re seniors, kids in the third-world country of Cyprus know
math as well as ours do.